Is it hypocritical for Austria to lionise the late Lucian Freud with an exhibition of his paintings at Vienna's magnificent Kunsthistorisches museum? The artist gave permission for this show in his very last years – but for all his life until then, he had refused to lend his paintings to Austria.

Now, he is the toast of Vienna with his pictures hanging next to those of his hero Titian. Is this, for all the agreement extracted from a frail old man, a shifty bit of mythmaking that buries Europe's crimes under Europe's glory? It's one thing to see Freud and Titian side by side: what continuity! Yet in reality, that continuity was savagely broken.

Vienna is the city of Freud's grandfather, Sigmund. Shamefully, it was also the city Sigmund had to flee. Having invented psychoanalysis in Vienna, he had to leave it in old age to escape the Nazis, and died in London. There, he joined Lucian and his family who had already moved to Britain from Berlin.

It's easy to see why Lucian Freud refused to exhibit in Vienna for decades, and tempting to see his posthumous exhibition there as a whitewash of history. And yet ...

Sigmund Freud was just one of the great cultural figures who left Vienna because they were Jewish or partly Jewish. The art historian EH Gombrich was born there in 1909, and learned his craft among Vienna's art collections until he moved to London in the 1930s. The historian Eric Hobsbawm also spent part of his childhood in Vienna. The Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein took British citizenship in 1939.

Austria contributed so much to modern culture – and that contribution was overwhelmingly Jewish. But one of the most distinctive contributions of Vienna's intellectuals was to see the vitality of the past, the power of heritage. Sigmund Freud was immersed in art history. He wrote a book about Leonardo da Vinci. His collection that survives in his London home bears witness to the depth of his interests from ancient Egypt to Renaissance Italy.

Gombrich, meanwhile, wrote classic books including The Story of Art and Art and Illusion that argue for the distinctive energy and intelligence of European art since ancient Greece. For Gombrich and Sigmund Freud, the European heritage was a marvel.

The place they could see this marvel most clearly as young men was Vienna's Kunsthistorisches museum – the very place where Freud is now being exhibited.

In a subtle way, his exhibition in Vienna is a homage to Sigmund Freud, to Gombrich, to the great minds that saw so deep into the power of art. Lucian Freud, too, is a thinker. His intellect as a painter is one that converses naturally with the masters of the past. Freud's peculiar genius proves the endurance of cultural values in spite of the hells the 20th century made.